Saturday, March 14, 2009

FBI Cited for Worst FOIA Responses

An open-government group cited the FBI today for poor response to requests for records by giving the bureau its annual award for “outstandingly bad responsiveness to the public that flouts the letter and spirit of the Freedom of Information Act” (FOIA).

George Washington University’s National Security Archive gave its "Rosemary Award" to the FBI for what the group found to be a high percentage of “no records” responses to FOIA requests in 2008 and the low percentage of requests that the FBI granted. According to the archive, last year the FBI gave “no records” responses to 57 percent of the requests it processed and provided documents in less than 14 percent of the cases. In addition, the group said the FBI granted only 89 FOIA requests in full by providing unredacted versions of all the documents requested.

The archive said FBI’s FOIA response rates were worse than the other major agencies and criticized the time it took the bureau to respond to record requests. Tom Blanton, that group’s director, also cited problems with the way the bureau searches its computer systems for records that have been requested.